The Dead Hours

Nieder Pedsen had been watching the drunk since before the doors had shut them all in for the night. The drunk’s hobnailed boots hung from the spectrewood stool, the iron toecaps swinging like gibbeted knights across the stretcher beam. The pale wood had been carved to resemble a human bone. Nieder was not learned enough in anatomy to know which bone, only that it looked sufficiently realistic to him. Back in the days that his thrice-great grandfather had walked as a living man, the denizens of Skeltmorr had made such objects from the real thing. The local craft shops had been famous for the things they could do with bone. But times changed. It was the way of the living to change with them.

Oblivious, the drunk snored on. His broad, bullied face lay in a puddle of ale. The table was strewn with the restless corpses of supper: empty flagons, dirty platters, intestinal loops of fried cabbage. Dried yolks clagged his orange-dyed beard and his snores rattled the cutlery. The aelf, fortunately, had left her drunken companion an hour previously. Hamnil had won the snap of the wishbone on that score, and had followed her. He was not back yet. But Nieder wasn’t worried. Hamnil was careful and thorough. Nieder didn’t expect to see him before Hysh-rise ushered out the dead hours.

He wasn’t concerned so much as disappointed.

His gaze slid to where the duardin’s axe lay on the floor under the dangling right boot. The fire bound to its uncanny metals scraped greedily at the bare stones. It had already taken off the straw, and frightened the gheist-roaches deeper into the folds of the oubliette dimensions that existed beneath the skirting boards. Black Mals had wanted to put his foot down where the axe was concerned, but there had been something in the duardin’s swagger as he had come in, caked in bone dust and strange gore, shouting for ale, food and lodging – and in that particular order – that had made the old man bite his tongue and bide his time.

Nieder wasn’t a worldly man, but he reckoned himself to be about as large as men came anywhere in the Princedoms. Traders passing through Skeltmorr were few these days, and tended to come in well-armed groups with big men as bodyguards. And Nieder had even been called on to subdue the occasional flesheater that wandered into the Bone Drake Inn with strange ideas in its head.

He eyed the drunk. And his axe.

Neither looked as though they would be dealt with easily.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Black Mals’ voice rasped like a hair shirt over ghoulflesh. His eyes were large and sunken. His skin was papery. His head was crowned with a lank string of nuisance hair. Some said it was for the colour of his hair that he had earned his name. Others, and that was Hamnil and Nieder included, suspected it was because if you cut him then that would be the colour he would bleed.

‘The size of him, though…’

‘He’s not grown any since closing time. And nor will you. Not even if you wait until the Nadir swallows the Drake with all of us still here inside.’

‘We should send for Hamnil.’

‘Hamnil will be preparing the aelf for the Tithekeeper. He’ll be busy all night.’

‘You could lend a hand, old man.’

Black Mals polished the countertop with a spirit-soaked rag, as though it were the skull of a particularly loathed ancestor for display above the privy shed.

‘He’ll wake if I have to pull him to the door,’ Nieder said.

‘Kill him here, then. But keep it clean. That axe of his has taken off the sawdust and I don’t want a mess to deal with before serving the breakfast crowd.’

Nieder frowned, then nodded to himself and eased out of his corner.

He rolled his shoulder, limbering up the stiff joint, and pulled the wooden maul from the loop strap on his belt. He weighed it in his hand. Eyeing up the duardin’s broad skull. Picking his spot. Hands of the Bone King, the duardin was even more massive up close than he had appeared from the corner. His feet may not have touched the floor, but the breadth of him was sprawled across the full width of the table.

‘Enough tiptoeing.’

Nieder started.

Black Mals scowled and went on. ‘Club him and be done with it.’

Nieder turned back to the table.

He found one bloodshot, madly inhuman eye glaring back up. ‘Club who?’ its owner slurred.

Nieder made a choking sound.

This, he promptly learned, was due to a fist the size of a corpsing shovel squeezing tight around his throat. The duardin hauled Nieder over the table and through the culinary wreckage. Nieder put up a fight, but it was like resisting a horse. The duardin drew him in until Nieder was at his eye’s level. Stale beer dribbled like saliva from the creased skin of his ruined face. His beard was a drowned mess of congealed fats and mustard stains. His eyepatch sat askew, revealing a scarred hollow underneath, and his breath was so potent that being close to it was like being held face down in a barrel of ale.

Nieder remembered the maul in his hand. He struck the duardin over the head with it.

The stranger grunted. His one eye crossed. He staggered half a step, a dent in his stark crest of orange hair, but without ever loosening his grip on Nieder’s throat.

Tingling in his face and in his fingers, Nieder lifted his maul for a second attempt.

Nieder was close to twice the duardin’s height, but when the drunkard shoved him off he tumbled the half-dozen yards to the bar and slammed into it with a knucklebone rattle of blunt knives and broken crockery. He lay there on his side, too winded and dazed to even try and crawl away.

‘Who were you calling old man?’ said Black Mals, his ancient wheeze from beyond the countertop punctuated by the bolt-snap of a breech-loading rifle. ‘It’ll be your bones for the Tithekeeper if you don’t take better care.’

The duardin stumbled as though the act of propelling Nieder so hard had upset his balance. One windmilling fist caught his table’s corner and, like any wobbling drunk groping after something solid to hold on to, he pulled it hard towards him and hauled it off the floor like a huge, two-hundred-pound shield. The handful of unbroken plates and tankards still on it crashed to the floor. It just happened to be the exact moment that Black Mals took his shot.

The blast obliterated half of the table.

The duardin glowered over the jagged edge of the lower half, wood splinters and metal shrapnel sticking to the cooking fats that coated his jaw like glue. He hurled the table to one side, clear across the wide taproom, and advanced unsteadily on the bar.

Black Mals cursed. The rifle rattled in arthritic claws as he fought to clear the breech and reload.

A brief scuffle. A scream. A muffled thud.

The sound of an antique rifle stock being buried in an old man’s skull.

Then a gurgle.

Blood trickled over the counter’s edge and pattered the back of Nieder’s neck.

Nieder wriggled determinedly along the ground towards the duardin’s greataxe. There would be some collateral harm. The Tithekeeper would just have to take the duardin in two pieces instead of one.

A heavy-bottomed boot pressed on his shoulder, driving his cheek and brow into the bare stone and leaving his fingers worming impotently shy of the axe’s haft.

The duardin cleared the gravel from his throat.

‘I would have it known, manling, that Gotrek son of Gurni is not in the habit of brawling with the common townsfolk. His axe thirsts after redder meat. But, as has been made plain to him on one occasion too many, the rules of this time continue to escape him.’ The duardin leant over his propped thigh. Nieder groaned under the added weight. ‘I freely admit to making it up as I go, and shan’t deny enjoying myself on occasion.’

‘I–’

‘Shush, manling.’ Gotrek gave his head a shake, and looked blearily around the empty tavern. ‘I appear to be missing a companion of mine.’ He raised one bloody haunch of a hand to about the flat top of his crest of hair. ‘Poisonous-looking thing. All skin and bones. About yay big.’

‘I’ll never– Arrrgh!’

Gotrek reached across to retrieve his greataxe, the duardin’s full and enormous weight crushing down on Nieder’s shoulder and chest.

‘Forgive me, manling. You were saying something.’

The fire bound to the two monstrous blades licked at the duardin’s face like a skin hound delighted at the return of its master. The grease stuck to his face popped and sizzled, but made no clear mark on his skin. Nor even his hair. The golden rune that was embedded in his wide chest appeared to brighten with the near touch of its sister flame, muttering and scowling in a voice like beaten metal and molten rock. Half heard. Wholly felt.

‘Hamnil.’ Nieder kicked himself inwardly, but didn’t stop himself from saying it again, louder. ‘Hamnil took her.’

‘What does he want with my aelf? Why would anyone take an aelf?’

Nieder’s eyes slid to the door.

Gotrek followed his look. ‘All right then.’ He took his weight from Nieder’s back.

Nieder gasped, clawing his way back towards the bar and freedom, only then to cry out again as the duardin picked him up by the ankle and dragged him towards the door.

The duardin butted open the heavy doors and hauled him over the door jamb. A pair of lightless moons hung from the sky above like skulls mounted on posts. Behind, the grey brick façade of the Bone Drake loomed into horned shadow. The night was starless and bitter.

Gotrek let go of Nieder’s ankle. He looked up and down the deserted street. Not a gheist or rasp moved. Every door was locked, every window shuttered.

‘Which of these hovels has my aelf in it? Grungni alone amongst your pantheon of false gods and pretenders knows how many times I have sought to be rid of her. And she of me. But to have her snatched from my side in the dead of night by some backwater potboys with a grisly trade on the side…’ The duardin seemed to harden in the dark, muscles creaking like cooling metal. ‘It would sit ill with me. And she swore she’d guide me on to Thanator’s Manse, and still owes me for the night’s board.’

‘She’ll have been taken to the Tithekeeper.’

‘Who, or what, is that?’

‘The town champion. He gathers the tribute we owe and delivers it.’

‘Where?’

Nieder shook his head. ‘Only the Tithekeeper truly knows. Beyond the Marrow Hills and across the Sunken Sea, to a dread regent of the Undying King. He rules from a seat of bone and in exchange for the yearly tithe sends his fleshless legions elsewhere. We emptied our crypts, handed over our reliquaries, dismembered every crook in our gaols. But it wasn’t enough. We took to disposing of travellers. There was a time when Skeltmorr saw a lot of travellers.’

‘Few of them come back a second time these days, I’d wager. Does the aelfling live?’

‘These are the dead hours. Not even the Tithekeeper would labour through Nagash’s time. She will be drugged and bound, ready for the Tithekeeper come morning.’ He bit his lip as if to keep himself from saying more, then blurted out. ‘It was Black Mals who told me to kill you there in the tavern. I only meant to hand you over to the Tithekeeper with the aelf.’

The duardin startled him with a huge laugh. The broken lengths of old, fire-damaged chain bolted to his wrists rattled like wraiths bound in spirit iron. ‘I have lost count of all the things that have sought my death, and long ago ceased taking such attempts personally, or mourning their failures.’ Gotrek leant in close, threatening to smother Nieder again with his odour. ‘And where did you mean to drag this corpse of mine when the shameful deed was done?’

Nieder stammered. Playing for time. Selling out Hamnil was one thing. Crossing the Tithekeeper was an altogether darker step to take.

Even now, he knew who he feared most.

A shutter banged open from across the street. Gotrek lifted his one-eyed gaze. Nieder looked up. A white-haired woman in a cryptsilk gown leant from her window. She looked across the street, silent as the night, her expression too distant to make out.

‘Back to your bed, old mother,’ Gotrek growled. ‘Unless you’re the Tithekeeper I’ve heard so much of then my quarrel is not with you.’

The woman disappeared back inside. The shutters banged closed.

‘Nosy wench,’ said Gotrek.

‘I can’t betray the Tithekeeper,’ Nieder hissed, low enough that the words would carry no further than the duardin’s ears. ‘The Bone King will come looking for his missing tithe and then the whole town will die.’

‘Maybe they will. Maybe your Tithekeeper’s been lying through his teeth and they won’t.’ The duardin shrugged. ‘Where’s my aelf?’

From across the street a door creaked open. It was the old woman. She emerged into the street, her white gown fluttering in the thin breeze like the death shroud of a ghost. Unheard and barely seen, several more doors breathed wide and exhaled their occupants into the night.

None of them moved. They watched.

‘Go back to your homes. This is no business of y–’

Gotrek grunted sharply, and Nieder’s gaze travelled up to see an arrow sticking out from the side of the duardin’s thick neck.

The Wislass sisters, both women widowed within a year of one another by the Tithekeeper, stood at their windowsill with shortbows in hand. The first shot had been the elder’s. The youngest was still straining against her bowstring with the arrow nocked. Gotrek bared his bloody gums but made no attempt to step out of the way. If anything his drunken stagger only squared his shoulders to make an even larger target of himself.

The widow took her invitation and loosed. The arrow flew an inch clear of Gotrek’s shoulder and skidded off down the dirt road.

The duardin grunted in disappointment.

‘Take him to the Tithekeeper,’ said the old woman from across the street, and started deliberately forwards. She pulled a long knife from the sleeve of her gown. The rest of the townsfolk followed a step behind, drawing in from every shopfront and porch step.

‘I’m beginning to like this town,’ said Gotrek. ‘Tell me again what it’s called.’

The old woman flashed her knife across the duardin’s arm. He bent lazily into the blow and took it across the snarling beast maw emblazoned on his shoulder plate. He produced a crooked grin of ale-brown teeth, and with an explosion of neck strength head-butted the old woman in the chest. She flew back as though kicked by a gargant, skidding the last few yards to rest by her front door.

‘Hammer of Sigmar!’ Nieder made a clumsy hash of a twelve-pointed star across his chest.

‘You can’t just cry to whichever god suits,’ Gotrek roared, blood splattering his monstrous face. ‘Pick one and pray like hell that you picked right, like the rest of us do.’

Cackling mercilessly, Gotrek ducked the swing of a butcher’s cleaver, broke the arm that wielded it, then hoisted the man by the belt and hurled him headlong into a dozen others, scattering them all like pins. Cockspur, the skinner, leapt on Gotrek from his blind side and rammed a knife into the muscle of his neck. Gotrek simply shrugged him off and raised his axe. Nieder sprang up with a shout. Gotrek flung back an elbow without bothering to turn, parting him from his cudgel and dropping him to the floor with a face full of broken pieces. Unstoppable, the duardin’s axe clove the skinner from neck to hip. The man screamed for longer than a dead man ought, fire gouting from his open mouth as the weapon’s power devoured him from the inside out. The duardin shouldered the crisped meat aside and swung his axe to meet the war-scythe that crashed into the cheek of the blade.

Nieder gawped over his broken jaw at the sight of the Tithekeeper roused to battle.

He was a strong man, beneath his dark robes, broad and tall, his features concealed behind a ghoulish sack mask. It was an old tradition, to separate the man from the grisly task, but in practice there was no one who did not know who he was or bless him for the service he gave.

Gotrek shoved back with a savage grunt. The Tithekeeper rode the push and spun, his war-scythe flickering. Gotrek sidestepped at the last, and a blow that would have claimed any other mortal’s head whispered across the metal plate of his shoulder. Gotrek countered with a crude punch of his axe butt. The Tithekeeper parried it. Sparks flew where the weapons met.

The Tithekeeper was Skeltmorr’s greatest fighter. He needed to be. He was the one who undertook the perilous trek to the place of tribute. He was the one it fell to, to take action when, despite the best efforts of the entire town, the sum of the tribute again fell short. Once, years ago, Nieder had thought that he had had what it took to be the Tithekeeper. The champion had put him on his back with a single move.

Now, he watched as Gotrek and the Tithekeeper traded blows, daring to blink only as the champion’s charred body hit the ground and his head rolled towards the tannery.

Gotrek spat on his beaten rival, and after another few seconds had dispatched everything else in the street that was not yet smouldering and still of a mind to fight. The Wislass sisters launched a further flurry of arrows, a few of which were shallowly buried in Gotrek’s chest, while the duardin moved on from slaughtering the living to set about tearing down the front wall of the women’s house. The happy crackle of flames took up roost in the half-timber frame and quickly spread, smoke pouring into the street.

The duardin stepped out from the spreading inferno, unburnt. Nieder peeled himself up off the ground. He stood before Gotrek with his head bowed, as he would before his god or his king. Talking felt like chewing on a lit coal, but he did it anyway.

‘I’ll take you to your friend.’

The belfry at the top of the mound wasn’t the largest building in Skeltmorr. That burden of honour rested on the Bone Drake. Or it had. The inn’s timber skeleton was still burning. But the old church was considerably older. It had been erected on the site by the followers of Sigmar, long before there had been a town on these hills, a brotherly gift of devotion to the faithful of the God-King’s dearest friend and ally. The bell had not tolled in generations and would not, so the legend went, until Nagash sought penance from his spurned brother and had forgiveness granted. Hummocks of turned earth dotted the climb towards its gates, regular as soldiers, as though a regiment of Graveswatch had been turned to crumbly ash-grey soil by the decree of the Bone King.

‘What is this unhallowed ground?’ Gotrek breathed, gripping tightly to his axe.

‘Where we buried our dead.’

The duardin shook his head but spoke no more aloud. Nieder led him along the winding path to the church’s threshold. Articulated columns of rough-hewn black stone framed its pallid gateway. Old and faded runes marked the bleached wood, Sigmarite spells to ward off the predations of skull-faced gods.

‘Shoddy stonework,’ said Gotrek.

‘It’s older than the hills.’

‘So am I.’

Nieder had no answer.

‘Is it locked?’ said Gotrek.

‘Always. And warded against–’

‘Good,’ said Gotrek, and kicked it down.

He stomped through. The stark light of his axe-metal sent claws of shadow deep into the crumbling masonry of the inside. A pair of smaller doors, mottled by wood mould and hanging from their hinges like rotten teeth, led to small rooms long fallen to disuse. At the end of a short corridor was a well of stairs leading up to the belfry and down to the cellar where the priests of old had stored beer and communed with the dead. Dusty hummocks of what looked like mouldering coats lay across the far end of the corridor around the mouth of the well.

‘Down it is,’ said Gotrek.

Nieder looked across. ‘Why not up?’

The duardin gave a laugh. ‘I wouldn’t care to test my weight on that floor above us, and I’ve been looking to meet my doom since your god cheated death for the first time. Trust a dwarf. It will be down.’

Nieder said nothing, hanging deliberately back as Gotrek forged ahead.

One of the skin heaps stirred.

The Bone Kings of Nagash demanded endless tribute. Of blood. Of bone. Even of souls. But most of the human body, they shunned. Skin. Hair. Teeth. Materials that generations of Tithekeepers and a people hardened to despise waste had learned to make use of.

Nieder smiled through the pain of his face as the first skin hound rose up off the ground and sank its collection of human teeth into Gotrek’s calf. The duardin bellowed in surprise as he fought to shake the thing loose, his efforts inadvertently rousing the rest of the pack from their torpor. There were nine in all. Each doggerel beast was a unique creation, a mangle of spliced parts put together in the most horrifically slight approximation of the canine they had been named for.

Gotrek succeeded in yanking the first creature’s bloody jaws from his leg, just as the rest of the pack attacked. With the first hound held at arm’s length, he tore open the leathery chest of the second with a blow from his axe. Stuffed innards of human hair went up like dried kindling, the golem beast bouncing off the near wall and scrabbling for footing, gummy jaws clapping even as it collapsed into flame.

Six more buried him in skin.

The ninth and last circled. It padded towards Nieder. Its head, sculpted into a canine snout, remained chillingly human. Its eyes, one brown and one blue, glimmered with lost intelligence, the faint wetness of an innocent on the brink of tears.

‘No,’ Nieder mumbled, struggling to speak clearly through his broken mouth. He held up an open hand as if to show the golem he was unarmed. He had lost his club in the street and had not thought at the time to pick it up. ‘I brought him for you. I’m not with him.’ The last words came out of him as a yelp as the skin hound lunged.

He dodged across the corridor. The skin hound hit the wall and rebounded, its tough hide rippling over soft-stuffed insides as it came back around. Nieder threw a punch. His fist walloped the side of its head and snapped it around, doing no damage whatsoever. Dead jaws champing, the skin hound snapped for his face as it bore him to the ground. Nieder got a hand under its throat and pushed it back, squeezing a last long-dead breath from its mouth and gagging on the stench. It heaved its weight against him and gnashed its teeth. Nieder beat against the side of its head with his other fist. It was like punching a bag of straw.

Suddenly the weight pushing down on him was no more. In its place came heat and a shower of stinking ash that had him coughing, then retching. He shook it off himself, and then sat up. In disbelief he looked around at the sight of eight skin hounds lying strewn and smouldering over the floor.

The ninth slid to the ground, its head mashed to a rag-doll flatness between Gotrek’s fist and the wall. The duardin turned to glance at the skin hound with which Nieder had, prior to his intervention, been wrestling.

‘Well fought, manling.’

Nieder tried to throw back something insulting, but the pain in his jaw turned the words to a hot-tempered gurgle that he spat, mixed with blood, onto the neck of his boot.

The duardin nodded as though agreeing with the sentiment, and then headed off for the stairs. Nieder picked himself up and followed.

There was another dead body at the bottom. This one was human, sprawled face down, half over the final two steps and half in the doorway that stood open at the bottom. Gotrek stepped over him and proceeded inside. Nieder crouched by the body. It was his junior partner, Hamnil. There was a slender knife stuck neatly between his shoulder blades. Nieder folded his fist around the delicate throwing handle and pulled it out in a spurt of blood.

‘Well, well,’ came Gotrek’s rough voice from inside. ‘I should have known you wouldn’t need all that much saving.’

Leaving Hamnil where he lay, Nieder got up, knife in hand, and followed the duardin inside.

He had been inside the Tithekeeper’s preparation room before. Many times. Though he had spent as little time there as he could get away with, and had never seen it properly as he did now. Ceramic urns marked with the dead hieroglyphic characters of the Bone Kings were stacked up high against the walls, filled, he supposed, with bone and neatly packed phylacteries of souls. Human skins, stretched taut over wooden frames, faced the tiny windows, there to cure in the weak Shyishan sun, though it was firelight that flickered in the ancient panes now. At the centre of the basement chamber was a table. The belfry’s original priesthood had probably had a more innocent use for the drain that lay beneath it.

The aelf woman sitting cross-legged upon the table glanced up as Gotrek and Nieder entered, as though distracted from the important task of scraping blood from her fingernails.

‘You took your time, Gotrek.’

‘Well, if you wander off in the middle of the night and get yourself kidnapped…’

‘Tears of Khaine, Gotrek, how much more of that rat poison did you drink after I left? I did not wander off.’ She shook her head in mock despair. ‘I went to take a look around. The appraising looks. The strange comments these people would make to one another when they were happy no human could still hear them. Only this one decided to follow me out.’ She nodded to the corpse by the door. As though recognising Nieder’s presence for the first time, she held out her hand and smiled the most insincere smile he had ever seen. ‘Be a darling and give me that knife you found, would you?’

Nieder hung his head and meekly handed it back.

‘I don’t recall any of this,’ Gotrek huffed.

‘Sweet thing,’ the aelf said to Nieder. ‘Any friend of Gotrek’s is a friend of mine.’ She turned to the duardin and scowled. ‘Somehow I do not have it in me any more to be surprised.’

‘You don’t have any more sharp objects hidden away under all that do you?’ said Gotrek.

‘A lady needs to have some secrets.’

Gotrek snorted.

‘He’s dead,’ Nieder mumbled, looking across to where Hamnil lay in the doorway.

‘Yes,’ said the aelf. ‘Pity. But he made two unfortunate life choices. The first was attempting to tie up and drug a Shadowblade of Khaine. The second was failing to tell me anything at all about this Bone King and his legion when I asked.’

‘Oh well,’ said Gotrek. ‘We’ve done our good deed for the week the way I see it.’

The aelf shrugged, sitting upright on the cutting table and licking the throwing knife clean with every sign of delight before stabbing it back into its concealed sheath.

Gotrek made an ugly face. ‘You make me sick, you know that? Like a vampire bloody kitten.’

The aelf laughed, as beautiful as broken glass, and turned to examine the urns stacked against the wall. ‘What do you propose we do with these?’

‘Can you read what’s written on them?’ said Gotrek.

‘The dead languages of darkest Shyish were not a part of the temple’s curriculum.’

‘Then here’s what I propose…’

Before Nieder could realise what the duardin intended, Gotrek had cracked open the closest urn with the flat butt of his axe. Bits of bone and pottery spilled across the chamber floor, following the shallow decline towards the blood drain. He broke another. Then another. Moving with a grim and set intent until the entire floor was carpeted in broken pottery. Nieder watched it happen. Saying nothing. Doing nothing. Wondering how many urns the bodies left in the Bone Drake and in the street outside of it would fill. How many more would need to be found before the Bone Kings came over the Marrow Hills and crossed the Sunken Sea in search of their tribute.

‘Another grateful town saved,’ said Gotrek, clapping the dust and grime of evil deeds well done from his enormous hands. He bared his big, blunt teeth at Nieder. ‘I wonder if there’s anywhere left in this town that does breakfast.’